


Glass Flowers

by MarigoldsScattering



Category: Kirby (Video Games), Kirby - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Guilt, Implied/Referenced Character Death, One-Shot, Past Relationship(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-03
Updated: 2019-04-03
Packaged: 2020-01-01 12:11:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,745
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18334334
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MarigoldsScattering/pseuds/MarigoldsScattering
Summary: Taranza finds something unexpected while going through Sectonia’s belongings.(A one-shot set immediately after Triple Deluxe and sometime before Star Allies.)





	Glass Flowers

Taranza woke up in a bed that wasn’t his, in an unfamiliar bedroom in an unfamiliar castle in an unfamiliar land. The sun was low in the sky by the time he made it to the window; unsurprising, given how long the night before had wound up being. The Dreamstalk loomed on the horizon, petals golden in the setting sun.

Bit by bit, memories of the night before returned to him, like coins dropping in a fountain. _Plink_. I took the wrong hero. _Plink._ Then the true hero came. _Plink._ Sectonia is dead.

Sectonia is dead.

He closed his eyes.

A knock at the door brought Taranza out of his daze. He went to answer and was met with a Waddle Dee bearing a tray. It wasn’t the one he’d seen yesterday, with the blue bandana, but it still pushed past him with an odd confidence, as though the two of them were old friends and it knew he wouldn’t mind much. It set the tray down on a nearby table, squeaking as it walked.

“Ah...thank you,” Taranza said when it turned to him, unsure of how else to respond.

The Waddle Dee nodded. It might have been smiling in its own mouthless way. He couldn’t tell. Then the door shut, and he was once again alone.

The wrong hero – Dedede, he’d learned his name was – had all but dragged him to this castle the night before, saying something about not letting Taranza go so easily after all the trouble he’d caused. Taranza had wondered at the time if maybe that meant he was a prisoner. It seemed only fair to get some kind of punishment after how spectacularly he’d messed everything up for everyone involved. Then again, the Waddle Dee had brought him tea just now, and the room he’d been given was a nice one. He didn’t think it was standard practice to give prisoners tea and feather beds.

Even so, he didn’t know if it was okay for him to leave. He didn’t know how to summon anyone to ask, either. So he sat there and did the only thing he could think of. He drank the tea. It was delicious.

By the time the pot was half empty, someone was once again knocking at the door. It was louder than before. They didn’t wait for a response before throwing it open. “You _have_ been holed up in here all day!” Dedede cried. “And I thought the Waddle Dees just didn’t know where to look.”

Once again, Taranza didn’t know how to reply. He settled for putting down the cup.

Dedede swaggered forward several steps. Then he stopped, suddenly looking awkward. He glanced away, rubbing the back of his neck.

“Er...look,” he said, gaze flickering back to Taranza. “Someone told me I should be straight with you, and you...you probably don’t need me blustering around on top of everything else right now, right? So I...I just wanted to say that I don’t blame you for anything. I get it. It’s not really the same, but I mean, I’ve been that guy who’s done dumb stuff before, and....it’d be pretty hypocritical of me to get mad at you about it, even if...I’m just trying to be better than that these days, okay?”

“Oh,” Taranza said.

He’d brought Taranza to the castle because the spider had seemed out of it before, the king explained. The embarrassed expression from before was wiped away and replaced with a look of authority, as if to say _no arguments_. None of them had been sure if he had anywhere to go, Dedede continued, and Taranza hadn’t been in a state to figure things out for himself, not in that daze. So, the king had made a decision.

He’d been bluffing before, Taranza realized. Nobody was going to punish him.

“You can stay here as long as you need to,” Dedede finished. “I dunno if you’re ready to go back to your place yet, so if you need time to figure stuff out, that’s alright with me. It doesn’t have to be here, neither. Kirby’s place has room too, and...”

“Thank you,” Taranza interrupted with a smile. “But I really should be going.”

✿✿✿

The palace was mostly empty upon his arrival. The people had fled, it seemed, looting and destroying most of what had furnished it. He couldn’t find a single tapestry that had gone unslashed. It made his chest hurt. _You don’t understand,_ he wanted to say. _She wasn’t supposed to have been like that. You weren’t supposed to hate her._

He supposed he couldn’t blame them. Floralia had lived under the queen’s reign for a long, long time. Though benevolent once – he could remember the days when she’d been popular, when the citizens had loved her almost as much as he had – in recent years, her rule had grown harder and harder. The people had suffered for it, so of course they were angry. Of course they were taking what they could from her ruins.  

Taranza could only say that because her actual rooms had been left untouched. Had he returned to find them razed as well, who knows what he might have done?

He began in her bedroom. Still, Taranza hadn’t yet decided what he was going to do with what he found there. The books and papers in her study, he would take, he thought: he could use those. But so much of what she had treasured most towards the end had been dresses, jewels, makeup. Beautiful things. Everything else, she had destroyed, and he had no use for them himself without a queen to give them to.

Keepsakes, he decided. Maybe he had no use for them, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t still hold onto them.  

With a wave of a hand, he opened a magical pocket in the folds of space. His priority was to get her belongings out of here one way or another, so he could just place everything in there for now and sort through them later.

That’s what Taranza told himself, at least. Still, he lingered. A ruby necklace – he’d given that to her after a particularly bad episode, to try and make her smile again. A pair of gloves – though fine, they hadn’t made her hands any gentler when she’d used them to break and strike. A blue silk dress – she’d worn that the day she’d declared her intentions to expand her rule.

Bitterness lingered in every memory he touched. She hadn’t been a very good queen towards the end, nor a very good friend. But she’d still been _his_ queen, _his_ friend. And somehow, he’d always thought that somewhere, underneath it all, the old Sectonia had remained. That if he’d just been able to please her enough, she’d remember that they’d been important to each other, once.

She hadn’t remembered, in the end. But _he_ had. He had always seen her potential to return to who she’d been. To _transcend_ who she had been. Even as she’d grown more and more warped, crueler and crueler, Taranza had still known that she was beautiful, really. All he’d wanted was for everybody else to see it too. If they had, then maybe she could have, too.

Eventually, all that was left was the things that had no value. At least, not to him. Furniture and wall hangings that she hadn’t cared about beyond how beautiful they were and would likely have destroyed on a whim some day when they no longer pleased her. He moved on to her study.

The study was both easier and far more difficult. Her books were all impersonal and had no memories attached but scattered among them were more personal documents. Every page he saw bearing familiar writing felt like a slap, even documents as mundane as drafts for new declarations or formal correspondence.

A part of Taranza hoped to find something more, like a diary, but she hadn’t kept one. It had been below her, she’d said. Servants could remember things for her, and she hadn’t wanted to risk putting her personal thoughts in writing. An enemy might have found them and used them against her, and Taranza supposed she’d had enemies enough towards the end.

She’d kept a diary _before,_ just like he had, but she’d destroyed that, as she’d destroyed most mementos of those days. Taranza hadn’t thought he’d ever have a reason to mourn that. Who would ever think to ask for a keepsake of a friend when you were convinced you were going to be with them forever?

It was only Taranza who remembered, and he would have to _keep_ remembering, no matter how badly he wanted to join her in the Dreamstalk. If he didn’t, she would truly would be gone.

The study was empty soon enough, and then Taranza moved on to the final room.

He had to muster up all his courage to enter. He’d been forbidden from this room for years and had never questioned it. Even if he had, entry wouldn’t have been possible for him, not with her personal magic sealing it. But now she was gone and all of her spells were broken, and if this was the last of what remained of his queen, he wanted to see inside, even if it would have made her angry.

He opened the door.

The first thing Taranza saw was the moon. The far wall was covered in enormous glass doors that opened onto a flower-hung balcony through which the moon shone, illuminating the enormous winged mirror frame that stood in the center.

 _Only_ a frame. Because the mirror itself was in pieces, shards of it littering the floor and gleaming like bits of silver in the moonlight. Taranza’s breath hitched as he moved closer. What had happened here?

He brushed a hand over the golden frame. He remembered this, he realized. He’d given Sectonia this mirror ages ago. She’d seemed infatuated with it for a while, and then it had disappeared completely. He’d assumed she’d lost interest in it. She’d been fickle, after all. What did it mean, that it had been here all along? What did it mean, that she had broken it?

 _The glass is all over the floor_ , he thought, dazed. _I should pick that up. Someone might get hurt._

With a wave of his hand, the sparkling shards rose into the air. But a moment later, he dropped them again. His eyes had fallen on the corner of the room, where a desk stood.

He hadn’t noticed it at first because he’d been too distracted by the glass, the mirror, the moon. Even so, it was notable because there was no other furniture in here. Aside from the empty frame, the room held nothing but the flowers on the balcony. It was an eerie, empty space, and yet there in the corner stood a desk, a desk that held what seemed to be an inkwell and a book.

As Taranza approached, he felt the same mixture of hope and dread that he’d felt in the study. He wanted to find something she’d written. He _didn’t_ want to find something she’d written. It would be too personal. It would be too removed.

He reached over and opened the book on the desk, then immediately slammed it shut again. It was her writing on the page, and he realized _this must be it._ The diary she’d said she hadn’t kept, the one that only she would have known about, because only Taranza had ever gone into her chambers and he would never have entered this most private of her private rooms without permission. Until now, that is.

Swallowing, he opened the book, this time to a random page. He wasn’t sure he could handle the beginning, not knowing how the story would inevitably end.

There, in Sectonia’s thin, fine handwriting, as graceful as a new blossom: _I want to be prettier._

Taranza turned the page so quickly that it almost ripped. Then again, and again, and again. He couldn’t stand to look at any one entry for longer than a second or two. He turned the pages so fast that the words began to blur together, making it so he could only catch fragments of them here and there. _Pretty, reflection, mirror, myself, ugly, disgusting, change, more more more._

Sectonia’s writing, so elegant at first, grew darker and scratchier the further in he got. _Beautiful,_ she’d written in an almost unrecognizable hand, far into the book. _Finally I’m beautiful._

Then suddenly, the scratchiness was gone. Suddenly her writing was thin and fine once more, but it was almost wavering, as though the person writing didn’t quite trust the way she held a pen. _My head aches so often now,_ said this trembling cursive. _Sometimes it hurts to even think. Sometimes it feels like I’ve only just woken up and don’t remember what I’m doing and when I try it just hurts even more._

Taranza stared at this page for a long, long time.

More carefully now, he turned it over. The dark scratchiness was back for a page long rant about a serving girl who had offended her. But then, another trembling entry not long afterwards: _How_ _long have I had wings?_

His heartbeat was growing louder and louder. He turned the page. Another trembling entry: _I’m so ugly._

Another: _I forgot Taranza today. I wanted him and couldn’t_ _remember his name and it made me so angry. I was angry at myself, but then when he came, I wound up shouting at him instead. I don’t know why I did that._

Another: _When I look in the mirror, all I see is dirtiness._

Another: _I don’t understand some of the things I’ve written in here. Is someone else using my diary?_

Another: _Something is wrong with me. I don’t understand. Why am I like this?_

There were many entries like this, all of them interspersed with the darker, scratchier handwriting. A part of him was afraid that the scratchier entries would overtake the trembling ones, but at last he reached the end of the book, and the final entry was written in that thin, wavering hand.

 _I know_ _the lower world has stories of a hero who solves everybody’s problems,_ it said. _A hero like that might be able to help me. Maybe that’s a silly thing to think, but I don’t know what else to do. I feel outside of myself so often that I don’t think I can help myself alone, and I can’t tell Taranza. I don’t want him to think that I_

The entry was unfinished. Whatever she wrote next was crossed out so heavily there was no hope of him making out the final words. Even so, what little remained was more than enough to fill him with horror.

Frantically, Taranza tried to remember. What exactly had she said, the day she’d told him to bring her the hero? She’d been talking about wanting to extend her reign, he remembered that much. But what had she said about the _hero?_ Had he known what she’d _wanted_ with the hero? Or had he just unthinkingly carried out her orders?

He’d taken the wrong hero. If he’d taken Kirby – the _true_ hero, the one capable of solving everybody’s problems – would things have turned out any differently?

Taranza sank slowly to the floor, and there he stayed, in a room filled with shattered glass and moonlight, for a long, long time.

✿✿✿

Dawn broke and Taranza got up.

Quickly and efficiently, he began undoing all of his work from the night before, putting everything he’d taken into magical storage back where it had been. He tidied as he went along, straightening papers and wiping away dust. By the time he’d finished, Sectonia’s rooms were practically sparkling, ready for her return. They looked as though nothing had changed.

 _Everything_ had changed. But Taranza knew now that he was going to fix that.

Everything had been his fault from the very beginning. He’d never once stood up to her. He hadn’t recognized the internal war she had apparently been waging with herself. He’d taken the wrong hero, only to now discover her request for the hero may have been the closest she’d come to a cry for help.

He’d helped the true hero kill her.

If she was gone now, it was because of him. And so, Taranza was going to bring her back.

**Author's Note:**

> I hope you enjoyed my first attempt at writing Kirby fanfiction! If you did, please consider leaving a comment as well as a kudos! I'd love to know what people thought!


End file.
